AltSci Cell

Why is Twitter useful? Twitter is a service that encourages people to post
messages to those people who value their contributions. Who values your
contributions? Your family and friends. If you are celebrity, you have a number
of fans that you don't know who value your contribution. Each person on Twitter
has an incentive to post useful information in a usable way. If they do not
post useful information, people will stop valuing their contributions. So we
get a system of people providing useful information free of charge to anyone
who follows them. Bam, instantly millions of people are talking publicly.

This is quite similar to MySpace or Facebook (except that facebook is
completely private and myspace is partially private and a few other things).
The issues with Facebook and MySpace is that it's design is different. Status
messages on these services are practically useless and are not properly
broadcast to people who care. Facebook has put a lot of work into changing that
but instead they made it complex enough and the UI is poor enough to dissuade
people from posting stuff like what they are doing after work. You don't want
to discuss stuff with facebook's UI. Twitter is capable of merging the UI of an
instant message client into a website that acts like a thousand chatrooms. But the
awesome difference is that instead of ignoring all the idiots in a chatroom,
you get to pick and choose who you actually want to listen to at your
prerogative.

Businesses
have finally taken technology seriously enough to make Twitter a priority in
their PR or engineering departments (depending on which the business considers
more capable of better communication for cheaper). So now consumers are getting
a strange position in Twitter also, they are able to ask companies publicly
about stuff and get the answer that the company considers publishable. Amazing,
no? By not answering or answering with weasel words, they are telling all the
customers who search for the same issue what they really think about it. No
longer can huge companies hide behind a faceless support department.

And that took a lot more than 140 characters to say! (Which is why Twitter will
never replace blogging thank goodness.)